The concert that killed your hearing

I think I’m going to make a pretty awesome old guy. My wife tells me this all the time, and I don’t take it as an insult. I’m good at puttering around and I enjoy going to bed early. A big reason why I had children was so they could help me up whenever I’m lying on my back. And while I don’t own one now, I look really good in this kind of hat. Give me 30 years and I might even be able to pull off an ascot.

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This was the last thing I saw before the ringing started …

One area where I’ve already gotten a huge jump on being a full-on old guy: My hearing. Due to a love of loud live music, a job that has allowed me to frequently get near the front of the stage and extremely poor planning (I always forget to bring earplugs), I would suspect that I currently have the hearing of a man twice my age. Considering this is such a music-loving community, I thought some of you might be in the same position, and we could start a support group. We’ll meet right here, so we don’t have to shout at each other in some church meeting room.

My loss of hearing was the result of a three-prong onslaught, not unlike a starting pitcher, middle reliever and closer in baseball. While these bands played 18 years apart, I consider them co-conspirators, forever linked in my damaged ringing cranium. I’m hopeful that they’ll some day play a concert together — maybe to raise money for my cochlear implant.

The concert(s) that killed my hearing are below. Yours in the comments …

Living Colour (San Luis Obispo, 1990): I’ve found that the venue has more to do with loud music than the band. Case in point: Living Colour, a band that was capable of rocking moderately hard, but wasn’t exactly giving Pantera a run for their money. This was the era when the funk/rock outfit wore flourescent wetsuits and had bad haircuts like Theo from “The Cosby Show.” Unfortunately, the gym at Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo was built for basketball, not concerts, and listening to music there was like bashing on cymbals in a Dumpster. I remember not being able to hear right for two days, and remarking to my friend Gregg, “Did our hearing just get jacked up from ‘Glamour Boys’?”

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St. Vitus: It’s like these guys live in my head.

St. Vitus (Van Nuys, 1995): This memory is kind of foggy, to be honest. A great deal of PBR was involved. My cousin Joe was one of the original forces behind the record label SST, and he had told me stories about the punk band St. Vitus, which has been described as a combination of Black Sabbath and Black Flag. I saw them in a smallish club somewhere in San Fernando Valley (or was it San Pedro …) and I have no idea how they got their amps in the door, because half of the club was filled with amplifiers. It was like sticking a boom box next to a bird cage. St. Vitus still tours, by the way, playing the same s—ty clubs. This will definitely be our next The Poop Meet-up.

Rage Against the Machine (San Francisco, 2007): I was assigned to review the first Rock the Bells concert in San Francisco, a musical event that combined some incredible artists — Wu-Tang Clan, Public Enemy, The Roots, Hieroglyphics, The Coup — with the living conditions of a Third World country. The concert was in the Giants parking lot, and the infrastructure was poor that year, making the place look like a trash dump by the middle of the afternoon. (The festival returns this Aug. 22 to Shoreline Amphitheater, a much better venue that acutally has seats!) After spending the evening wading through the crowd, a kindly PR person asked if I wanted to see closing act Rage Against the Machine — just starting a short comeback tour — up close in the pit where the photographers were. Let me tell you, when Tom Morello started his guitar part for “Bullet in the Head,” it was like a needle was jabbing my eardrums. I found the fattest photographer and literally had to position my head between him and the amplifiers to keep the pain to a manageable level. The concert was great, by the way. But I left my incredible view early, and listened to the last few songs from the back of the venue. Then I drove home in near silence. Not by choice.

What concert ruined your hearing?

PETER HARTLAUB is the pop culture critic at the San Francisco Chronicle and founder of this parenting blog, which admittedly sometimes has nothing to do with parenting. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/peterhartlaub.